Soccer

                This past weekend there was a small soccer tournament between my school and a few other schools in nearby districts. It was a tournament for girls’ soccer and boys’ basketball. The tournament consisted of high school and middle school students. There were only four girls’ soccer teams in the high school division, but it was only 6 a side when normally soccer is 11 a side.

My schools girls soccer team was split up into an A and B team.  The first game that we played happened to be against the other half of our normal team (A vs. B). I was playing for the A team, and after a while and many goals our coach told us to stop scoring and take it easy on the B team. For the rest of that game we tried just passing the ball around to the other players on our team, but the B team did put up a good fight. The second game for the A team was against the team hosting the tournament. That team was very feisty, and since I was playing defense I got some hard blows. One of the opposing teams’ giant forwards came running at me at full speed and then knocked me to the ground. I felt sort of like one of those movies where a person waking up looks above them and sees people standing around them swirl and fog up and then eventually clear up. I never got knocked out, but things definitely were spinning for a while.

On the second day of the tournament there were 2 or 3 players who didn’t show up. My coach came up to me 2 minutes before the B teams game started and informed me that I would be playing for the B team as well as the A team. All the games I played with the B team we lost, and all the games with the A team we won. So it all seemed to work out pretty well. In the end our two teams got 1st place and 4^th, the boys basketball team got 1^st as well, and the two middle school teams received 2^nd in their divisions. Overall it was a successful tournament, and I have the bruises and turf burns to prove it.